Education Bookcast: 39b. The Geography of Thought by Richard Nisbett [continued]

39b. The Geography of Thought by Richard Nisbett [continued]

Apr 8, 2017

This continues the episode about The Geography of Thought, looking at more ways in which the cultural differences manifest themselves in differing psychologies of people from different parts of the world. Themes include:

Visual perception;
Descriptions and understandings of the self;
Attitudes to choice;
"Fitting in" versus uniqueness;
Attitudes to the law and contractual agreements;
Factors affecting motivation;
Preference for different types of reasoning; and
Approaches to blame and causality.

I also answer some questions posed at the beginning of last episode, namely:

Why do modern Asians excel at science and maths, and yet have few Nobel prizewinners?
Why were the ancient Chinese good at algebra and arithmetic, but bad at geometry, which the ancient Greeks excelled in?
Why did the West outpace the East in science and technology, given how far ahead China was in the fourteenth century?

The big idea here, as before, is that our thinking about psychology and education may be less universal than we realised. Many things that we thought were fundamental parts of human nature turn out to vary from culture to culture. It's a sobering thought, and has led me to have to rethink a range of conclusions about education, psychology, and human nature that I was previously quite confident about.

Enjoy the episode.

Music by podcastthemes.com.